Beacon Press Leader's Guide to Kindred
Another extensive reader's guide. Go to the three "Sessions" for ideas and discussion questions that tie Kindred to slavery, racism, and American culture.

Kindred Study/Discussion Questions
There are dozens of questions re structure, themes, and characters in Kindred.

Kindred Short Story Project
Students write a story to be published on a school web page. Teacher has included reading assignments and a rubric.

An Octavia Butler Bibliography

(Print) Works About the Author/Octavia Butler Resources
Extensive list offered by Pasadena City College

Bookmarks: A Companion Text for Kindred
"Bookmarks is a series of companion textbooks that provides teachers with creative exercises and activities to supplement the teaching of a novel. Bookmarks are integrated reading-writing skills texts that address each of the seven intelligences identified by Howard Gardner: there are tasks/activities for the linguistically, logically-mathematical, kinesthetically, spatially, musically, interpersonally, and intrapersonally intelligent students."

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
This collection from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress presents digitized transcripts of interviews of former slaves, conducted under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), a Depression-era Works Progress Administration program that put unemployed writers to work. Users can search the narratives by keyword, browse by narrator's name or volume, and search and browse the photographs.

Criticisms
Allison, Dorothy. "The Future of Females: Octavia Butler's Mother Lode." In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology edited by Henry Luis Gates, 471-78. NY: Meridian, 1990.
Foster, Frances S. "Octavia Butler's Black Female Future Vision," Extrapolation (1982): pages 37-49
Salvaggio, Ruth. "Octavia Butler and the Black Science Fiction Heroine." Black American Literature Forum. Vol 18, number 2 (1984): pages 78-81.

“Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women’s Fiction: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” Studies in American Fiction 27.1(Spring 1999): 103-28.

"Slavery and Symbiosis in Octavia Butler's Kindred," Foundations: The International Review of Science Fiction. 84:1, Spring 2002.

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu has a story and an essay in the speculative fiction anthology, Dark Matter: The Reading of the Bones (Warner Aspect). It also has stories from and essays from Octavia Butler and others. Dark Matter: The Reading of the Bones "is an unprecedented collection of black sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction....this book debunks the notion that black writers can't excel in these genres."- Savoy Magazine

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